Perspective The awesome scale of today's data centers can only be appreciated by touring them.
Their huge halls house rack upon rack of equipment and feature seemingly endless corridors, spotless cleanliness, fortress-like physical security and resilience to power failure--all managed by just a handful of employees. They will not fail to impress.
Only those prepared to invest tens of millions can afford true enterprise-class data centers, however. In fact, many enterprises actually no longer bother, at least not for their entire data center requirements but instead turn to co-location providers who are investing in such infrastructure on a massive scale.
Quocirca was recently shown around Equinix's LD4 data center, which is located west of London and opened in October 2007.
Its attention to security is demonstrated by the fact we were not provided the location details until a confidentiality agreement had been signed. Having said that, it is not easy to keep such a large facility secret. Cruise around a few well known industrial estates and you can pick out the data centers: large shiny buildings a couple of stories high, with few windows, no high profile company logo on show, and fearsome looking security.
